From Sea To Shining Sea

This site is dedicated to providing moderate-right opinions, and information and articles that counter some of the nonsense being inculcated in our young people by public schools and by many colleges and universities. It rejects multiculturalism, embraces the melting pot and celebrates the idea of America. *Vi er all Dansk nu.*

Monday, June 30, 2008

A silver bullet for Obama?

I disagree completely with Jacoby's point here that Obama has changed his mind about gun-control, and that the recent 2nd Amendment ruling by the Supreme Court makes it easier to vote Democrat. Obama has reversed himself dozens of times in this past year when confronted by evidence that his original positions were untenable. This doesn't mean that, in his mind, he has really changed his beliefs, and his economic program is still a repeat of the disastrous Carter years.

As far as voting Democrat is concerned, those wishing to exercise their rights usually find that, in Democrat-controlled states (like Massachusetts and Rhode Island), an informal system has been put in place to stop you, even if the law is on your side. In Massachusetts you must get a permit to have a firearm in your own home, but no-one ever seems to know where the forms are, and officials routinely miss appointments to meet with you to discuss firearms permits.

I had a permit to carry in Massachusetts for over 30 years (issued before the gun-control people took over completely) with no incidents. I had to give it up because I now live in Florida and in Rhode Island. I easily gained a carry permit in Florida , but in RI, after passing all the tests and other requirements, I was denied because I couldn't "demonstrate a need according to the statute".

It is wonderful that the decision by the Supreme Court has opened up opportunities for the NRA and other groups to challenge many existing gun laws, but it doesn't mean that the gun-control proponents have given up. They will just get even more sneaky.

WHEN IT comes to gun control, the Democratic Party is a house divided against itself. That helps explain Barack Obama's dizzyingly inconsistent positions on District of Columbia v. Heller, the landmark Second Amendment case decided by the Supreme Court last week.

As a candidate for the Illinois Legislature in the 1990s, Obama had supported legislation to "ban the manufacture, sale, and possession of handguns," so it wasn't surprising that he endorsed the gun ban being challenged in Heller while campaigning for president. In November, for example, his campaign told the Chicago Tribune that "Obama believes the D.C. handgun law is constitutional." In February, when a questioner during a televised forum said, "You support the D.C. handgun ban," Obama readily agreed: "Right."

By March, however, his spokesman would no longer say whether Obama considered the gun ban constitutional, and when the senator was asked about it in April, he refused to give a clear answer on the grounds that "I obviously haven't listened to the briefs and looked at all the evidence." Still, when the court issued its 5-4 ruling last Thursday, Obama claimed that his views had been vindicated. "I have always believed," his statement began, "that the Second Amendment protects the right of individuals to bear arms." Then again, reported the Associated Press, "the campaign would not answer directly . . . when asked whether the candidate agreed with the court."

This is not just the customary political choreography whereby Democratic presidential candidates dance to the left during the primary election season, then pirouette back to the center for the general election. (Republicans twirl the other way.) Guns are a particularly thorny issue for Democrats, who have long been the party of gun control, and whose strong left wing detests firearms and looks down on the "gun nuts" who enjoy them. Liberal Democrats have generally seen the Second Amendment as an embarrassing constitutional anachronism. And they nurse a singular loathing for the National Rifle Association.

The problem for Democrats is that such views are well beyond the American mainstream. There are as many as 283 million privately owned firearms in the United States, and nearly half of all US households own at least one gun. Even before the Supreme Court ruling, a large majority of Americans - 73 percent, according to Gallup - believed the Second Amendment guaranteed the right of private citizens to own guns. Nearly 7 in 10 opposed any law making handgun possession illegal.

Given such widespread pro-gun sentiment, a political party inclined to demonize guns can expect to alienate many voters. In 1994, within months of enacting a ban on assault weapons, Democrats lost their majorities in both houses of Congress. Their "inability to consistently win elections in places where gun shops outnumber Starbucks," the respected political analyst Charlie Cook wrote in National Journal during their long exile, "is a big reason the party controls neither the House nor the Senate."

Some Democrats have worked to shed the image as the party of gun-haters. Running for president in 2004, Senator John F. Kerry made a point of donning orange and hoisting a shotgun for a very public day of duck hunting in southern Ohio. When Senator Ben Nelson of Nebraska and Governor Brian Schweitzer of Montana ran for reelection two years later, their TV ads depicted them using guns. More than 60 Democrats were endorsed by the NRA in the midterm election of 2006 - the election, perhaps not coincidentally, in which their party regained control of Congress.

Still, for many Democratic liberals, the antigun animus is reflexive. Senators Ted Kennedy and Dianne Feinstein wasted no time deploring the court's ruling in Heller last week; Mayor Richard Daley of Chicago denounced it as "very frightening." Over the years, such attitudes have been a political boon to Republicans, helping them paint Democrats as out-of-step elitists who hate something millions of Americans love. John McCain's statement hailing the decision pointedly referred to Obama's infamous statement that Middle Americans "cling to guns or religion" when "they get bitter."

Ironically, the impact of last week's decision may be to deprive the GOP of a valuable political weapon. By ending the debate over whether the Second Amendment confers an individual right to own guns, the justices have just made it safer for gun owners to vote Democratic. McCain cheered the court's ruling, but Obama may prove the biggest winner of all.

Sunday, June 29, 2008

Can We Still Roll Up Our Sleeves?

I was disheartened by the lack of any relevant responses to my proposal to impose a national sales tax to fund subsidizing the establishment of manufacturing businesses in inner cities – to be coupled with the elimination of all of the failed, anti-poverty programs in existence now (The Change America Really Needs).

Certainly there is much to fault in my proposal, but my opinion is that we have to think ‘outside the box’ in order to get a handle on the most pressing domestic issue that faces us – what to do about our rapidly disintegrating cities and the criminal element that is taking them over. In city after city, police departments have ruled out entering certain areas because the situation is out of control and their lives are so much at risk there.

Although liberals will be kicking and screaming in denial, there is no question that every anti-poverty program, from AFDC (even after reform) to Section 8 housing grants has not only failed, but has created a class of people and a way of life that is a spreading cancer on our society. The lessons of Katrina should not be ignored or lost.

At the same time, manufacturing resources and skills, vital to our economy and to our national security are being lost. For every few machinist jobs lost there is also the loss of the tool designing and tool making skills that support them, and now our remaining automobile factories, supporting thousands of critical skills needed to produce weapons, vehicles and armaments, are also in danger of being lost forever.

To the head of a household in an inner city neighborhood, as everywhere else, a real job, paying a wage and benefits that will support a family, is crucial, but those jobs are almost all gone for unskilled and semi-skilled labor. We must find a way to get them back.

Has America lost its ability to roll up its sleeves and get the job done? I feel we will find out shortly as we confront the disastrous energy situation in which we also find ourselves. We must also confront our crumbling society.

Friday, June 27, 2008

Obama and His Comrades Have Set a Trap for You

It is becoming more evident every day that the left-wing of the Democratic Party is delighted that the price of gasoline and diesel fuel is now between $4.00 and $5.00 per gallon.

According to Barack Obama, high gas prices don’t really constitute a problem for Americans. He stated recently that the reason for our anger is “the rapid increase in prices, not the prices themselves”. Obama claimed that Americans would have accepted a “gradual adjustment” to the current cost.

For years now, in response to the demands of environmental extremists, liberal Democrats like Obama and some RINO’s have pursued policies designed to raise prices and punish Americans who consume petroleum in their daily lives. We have been prevented from drilling wherever domestic oil supplies might be found, and we have been forced to become completely dependent on foreign, often unfriendly, sources of oil – jeopardizing our national security and turning our dollars over to those who are trying to kill us.

Rightly or wrongly, and whether we like it or not, the United States has become a suburban nation where we live in suburbs, we shop in suburbs and we work in suburbs. We must use our automobiles, and this means we must have gasoline to run them until, 25 or 50 years from now, hydrogen or some other, economical alternative fuel becomes available. Corn-based ethanol is now seen to create more problems than it solves.

Now that the American public has risen in anger about the high prices of gasoline, diesel fuel, heating oil and natural gas, these same Democrats in Congress are trying to escape blame and head off an expansion of domestic drilling by trying to confuse us about the facts. They are throwing out every deception that they can think of: speculators are to blame, they say; the oil companies are gouging us, they say; 68 million acres already available for drilling, they say.

Oil company profits are huge, but so are the companies, and their profits are in line with many other industries; the 68 million acres under lease have largely been explored and come up empty; excess speculation is a factor, but the basic underlying problem is that the International Energy Association (IEA), the best, non-partisan source of oil market data and forecasts, has, for the first time ever, forecast that demand will exceed supply by the end of next year.

Each of these deceptions proves to be a case of smoke and mirrors when examined: the fact is, they, the Democrats, are to blame, and legislation authorizing drilling must happen now. If this happens, financial speculators will dump their contracts, and the price of oil will come down immediately.

Oil and gas prices that have doubled in the past year have squeezed aside the war in Iraq as the No. 1 issue this election year, and the parties are blaming each other for the price spike, and for apparent congressional paralysis.

Obama and McCain have made high gas prices a top issue in their campaigns and have offered dueling remedies. Their positions are being echoed daily by their surrogates on Capitol Hill. And each makes it sound as if only his proposals would chart the path to lower fuel prices and a final cure for what President Bush once labeled the nation's addiction to foreign oil.

This debate is certain to get louder before the election.In a USA Today-Gallup Poll released yesterday, nine in 10 people said energy, including gas prices, would be very or extremely important in deciding their vote in November, tying it with the economy as the top issue.

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Misconceptions about drilling in the Arctic Herald Tribune May 18, 2008 (letter excerpts)

“In the summer, ANWR is a muddy plain; in the winter, it is frozen tundra. Nobody lives there. The wildlife is less dense than the area of the North Slope, where oil drilling and production occur today….

The entire hydrocarbon resource, if it exists, can be produced without roads and with surface disruption of no more than a couple thousand acres. Such is the state of modern oil-field technology.

If the people we sent to Congress had passed the proposal for drilling in ANWR when it was first proposed 10 years ago, we would now be enjoying the consequences (lower gas prices) of the resource, if it even exists.”Weldon G. Frost

The writer is a retired petroleum geologist. He resides on Longboat Key.

We are paying a terrible price for the unreasonable demands of the environmentalists. My life and my standard of living is more valuable than that of the ubiquitous snail darter.

Wednesday, June 25, 2008

The Change America Really Needs

As a retired college professor I may live in a bubble of comfort, but I realize full well that millions of Americans live in poverty and hopelessness. It is truly unfortunate that every scheme advanced by liberals over the years aimed at helping people out of poverty has failed so miserably. AFDC Welfare has created millions of fatherless children to their detriment and to the great detriment of society as a whole. AFDC should be converted into a temporary emergency program for new recipients. In my last column I discussed the total failure of the Section 8 Housing program, and Katrina showed us just what the terrible consequences of the anti-poverty programs have inflicted on a population, rendering them helpless to take any action to deal with a weather catastrophe. As a survivor of Hurricane Charley, I can attest to the extraordinary efforts of neighbors working together to overcome incredible destruction with only minimal help from government agencies. Contrast that with the crime and utter helplessness and finger-pointing we saw in New Orleans.

What has been missing in all of these government programs is the understanding that the most important element in the life of the head of every household is a JOB, - not a hamburger-flipping, minimum wage job, but one that offers a real living wage and some sense of accomplishment, whether it is in digging a ditch, completing a trucking run or producing a manufactured item.

Both the Clinton and the Bush administrations have had extremely good records of accomplishment with respect to the unemployment rate and in job growth and creation, however the manufacturing jobs that provided good wages for unskilled and semi-skilled workers have largely disappeared and continue to disappear from our population centers. These jobs have disappeared due to foreign competition, union overreach, NAFTA, high taxation on businesses by state and local governments and technological obsolescence.

In my opinion, it is the disappearance of these kinds of jobs and what was done about it that is mostly responsible for the disintegration of large areas of American society, the signs of which can be seen all around – from the drug problem to the increasing crime rates in our mid-size cities, to the tremendous increases in fatherless children and the huge prison population we must now support. The reader may be surprised to learn that the rate of births to unwed mothers was exactly the same, about 25%, for both whites and blacks before the advent of the Great Society which attempted to ameliorate the problems caused by job losses. That rate has now doubled for whites and tripled for blacks.

If we try to reinvigorate our manufacturing sectors by imposing tariffs on imports, we would risk trade wars and a second “Great” depression. What I would like to see us do is expand the tax credit programs now in place and add to them a multi-billion dollar system of grants and subsidies to companies that locate new manufacturing plants in urban areas that would make products that require intensive labor to produce.

Now, I have always hated and tried to minimize my taxes; I’ve usually voted for the person I thought would tax me the least, but I’m prepared to spend 1% or 2% on every purchase I make toward a national sales tax that is restricted only to the purpose of subsidizing new manufacturing plants as described, and would continue to subsidize them as long as is needed, so long as a market exists for the product, and the technology represented is appropriate. I realize that we prove over and over again that government usually fails terribly whenever it gets involved in commercial ventures, so some kind of system of public-private boards, with a majority composed of individuals from businesses and non-profit organizations would have to be set up so that good decisions are made about where to invest, and oversight is in place to prevent corruption. Rhode Island already has, as do many states, a publicly funded, privately run fund that invests in new companies that locate here, however this fund, called the Slater Technology Fund, only invests in high-tech companies that employ highly skilled workers.

I know that this plan has aspects of socialism and that it will take a tremendous effort to design a system that works and can be sold to the American people, but would you rather have that kid on your block grow up to be a drug dealer or earning a living wage making brooms in the broom factory down the street? I am not talking about nationalizing any industries, however I would step in and save plants that met the above requirements and were going out of business due to foreign competition.

This plan does in some measure go against my conservative ideology, but I can’t think of another way to overcome the disintegration of American society I see happening. In a just society everyone is not equal, but everyone should have some chance for a good life as a contributing member of that society. I don’t think that’s true anymore in America, and liberal-inspired solutions always make the problem much worse.

Monday, June 23, 2008

Another Major Liberal Hallmark a Total Failure

We could write columns for the rest of our lives just enumerating the failures of programs inspired by liberals and liberal philosophy – the Great Society, the destruction of families by Welfare, affirmative action, the destruction of our public education system, forced busing, shutdown of drilling for oil and stopping the building of more nuclear plants, dealing with Islamic terrorists in the criminal justice system, etc., etc. Today I want to focus on liberal programs in the area of housing. We are all aware of the total failure of public housing projects which turned into places where incredible rates of criminal behavior took place – murders, drug use and distribution, prostitution, welfare fraud, etc. Many projects have long since been torn down, and the failure of this approach well-recognized, but what we don’t generally know is that the liberal program of Section 8 Housing that replaced the projects has been an even greater failure. In the latest issue of the “Atlantic Monthly” a devastating article has been published that will probably eventually lead to the end of Section 8 Housing.

I have excerpted the article here below; it is a long article, but fascinating and well worth reading.

Why is crime rising in so many American cities? The answer implicates one of the most celebrated antipoverty programs of recent decades.

by Hanna Rosin

THE THIN BLUE LINE: Doug Barnes of the Memphis Police Department inside the Old Allen Station armory

“Barnes is white, middle-aged, and, like many veteran cops, looks powerful without being fit. He grew up four miles from the station during the 1960s, he said, back when middle-class whites lived peacefully alongside both city elites and working-class African Americans. After the 1968 riots, Barnes’s father taught him the word curfew and reminded him to lock the doors. Still, the place remained, until about 10 years ago, a pretty safe neighborhood where you could play outside with a ball or a dog. But as he considered more-recent times, his nostalgia gave way to something darker. “I have never been so disheartened,” he said.

He remembers when the ground began to shift beneath him. He was working as an investigator throughout the city, looking into homicides and major crimes. Most of his work was downtown. One day in 1997, he got a call to check out a dead car that someone had rolled up onto the side of the interstate, on the way to the northern suburbs. The car “looked like Swiss cheese,” he said, with 40 or 50 bullet holes in it and blood all over the seats. Barnes started investigating. He located one corpse in the woods nearby and another, which had been shoved out a car door, in the parking lot of a hospital a few miles away. He found a neighborhood witness, who gave up everything but the killers’ names. Two weeks later, he got another call about an abandoned car. This time the body was inside. “It was my witness,” he recalled, “deader than a mackerel.”

At this point, he still thought of the stretch of Memphis where he’d grown up as “quiet as all get-out”; the only place you’d see cruisers congregated was in the Safeway parking lot, where churchgoing cops held choir practice before going out for drinks. But by 2000, all of that had changed. Once-quiet apartment complexes full of young families “suddenly started turning hot on us.” Instead of the occasional break-in, Barnes was getting calls about armed robberies, gunshots in the hallways, drug dealers roughing up their neighbors. A gang war ripped through the neighborhood. “We thought, What the hell is going on here?” A gang war! In North Memphis! “All of a sudden it was a damn war zone,” he said….

On September 27, 2007, a headline in The Commercial Appeal, the city’s biggest newspaper, announced a dubious honor: “Memphis Leads U.S. in Violent Crime.” Local precincts had been seeing their internal numbers for homicide, rape, aggravated assault, and robbery tick up since the late 1990s, starting around the time Barnes saw the first dead car. By 2005, a criminologist closely tracking those numbers was describing the pattern as a crime explosion. In May of 2007, a woman from upscale Chickasaw Gardens was raped by two men, at gunpoint; the assailants had followed her and her son home one afternoon. Outraged residents formed Citizens Against Crime and lobbied the statehouse for tougher gun laws. “People are concerned for their lives, frankly,” said one county commissioner, summarizing the city’s mood. This March, a man murdered six people, including two young children, in a house a few miles south of Old Allen Station.

Falling crime rates have been one of the great American success stories of the past 15 years. New York and Los Angeles, once the twin capitals of violent crime, have calmed down significantly, as have most other big cities. Criminologists still debate why: the crack war petered out, new policing tactics worked, the economy improved for a long spell. Whatever the alchemy, crime in New York, for instance, is now so low that local prison guards are worried about unemployment.

Lately, though, a new and unexpected pattern has emerged, taking criminologists by surprise. While crime rates in large cities stayed flat, homicide rates in many midsize cities (with populations of between 500,000 and 1 million) began increasing, sometimes by as much as 20 percent a year.

In 2006, the Police Executive Research Forum, a national police group surveying cities from coast to coast, concluded in a report called “A Gathering Storm” that this might represent “the front end … of an epidemic of violence not seen for years.” The leaders of the group, which is made up of police chiefs and sheriffs, theorized about what might be spurring the latest crime wave: the spread of gangs, the masses of offenders coming out of prison, methamphetamines. But mostly they puzzled over the bleak new landscape. According to FBI data, America’s most dangerous spots are now places where Martin Scorsese would never think of staging a shoot-out—Florence, South Carolina; Charlotte-Mecklenburg, North Carolina; Kansas City, Missouri; Reading, Pennsylvania; Orlando, Florida; Memphis, Tennessee.

Memphis has always been associated with some amount of violence. But why has Elvis’s hometown turned into America’s new South Bronx? Barnes thinks he knows one big part of the answer, as does the city’s chief of police. A handful of local criminologists and social scientists think they can explain it, too. But it’s a dismal answer, one that city leaders have made clear they don’t want to hear. It’s an answer that offers up racial stereotypes to fearful whites in a city trying to move beyond racial tensions. Ultimately, it reaches beyond crime and implicates one of the most ambitious antipoverty programs of recent decades.

Early every Thursday, Richard Janikowski drives to Memphis’s Airways Station for the morning meeting of police precinct commanders. Janikowski used to teach law and semiotics, and he still sometimes floats on a higher plane; he walks slowly, speaks in a nasal voice, and quotes from policy books. But at this point in his career, he is basically an honorary cop. A criminologist with the University of Memphis, Janikowski has established an unusually close relationship with the city police department. From the police chief to the beat cop, everyone knows him as “Dr. J,” or “GQ” if he’s wearing his nice suit. When his researchers are looking for him, they can often find him outside the building, having a smoke with someone in uniform.

One Thursday in March, I sat in on the morning meeting. About 100 people—commanders, beat cops, researchers, and a city councilman—gathered in a sterile conference room with a projector up front. The session had none of the raucous air of precinct meetings you see on cop shows. Nobody was making crude jokes or bragging about the latest run-in with the hood rats.

One by one, the precinct commanders presented crime and arrest statistics in their wards. They broke the information down into neat bar graphs—type of crime, four-week comparison, shifting hot spots. Thanks to Janikowski’s influence, the commanders sounded more like policy wonks than police. “It used to be the criminal element was more confined,” said Larry Godwin, the police chief. “Now it’s all spread out. They might hit one area today and another tomorrow. We have to take a sophisticated look on a daily, hourly basis, or we might never get leverage on it.” For a police department facing a volatile situation, the bar graphs imposed some semblance of order….

About five years ago, Janikowski embarked on a more ambitious project. He’d built up enough trust with the police to get them to send him daily crime and arrest reports, including addresses and types of crime. He began mapping all violent and property crimes, block by block, across the city. “These cops on the streets were saying that crime patterns are changing,” he said, so he wanted to look into it.

When his map was complete, a clear if strangely shaped pattern emerged: Wait a minute, he recalled thinking. I see this bunny rabbit coming up. People are going to accuse me of being on shrooms! The inner city, where crime used to be concentrated, was now clean. But everywhere else looked much worse: arrests had skyrocketed along two corridors north and west of the central city (the bunny rabbit’s ears) and along one in the southeast (the tail).

Hot spots had proliferated since the mid-1990s, and little islands of crime had sprung up where none had existed before, dotting the map all around the city. Janikowski might not have managed to pinpoint the cause of this pattern if he hadn’t been married to Phyllis Betts, a housing expert at the University of Memphis. Betts and Janikowski have two dogs, three cats, and no kids; they both tend to bring their work home with them. Betts had been evaluating the impact of one of the city government’s most ambitious initiatives: the demolition of the city’s public-housing projects, as part of a nationwide experiment to free the poor from the destructive effects of concentrated poverty. Memphis demolished its first project in 1997. The city gave former residents federal “Section8” rent-subsidy vouchers and encouraged them to move out to new neighborhoods. Two more waves of demolition followed over the next nine years, dispersing tens of thousands of poor people into the wider metro community.

If police departments are usually stingy with their information, housing departments are even more so. Getting addresses of Section 8 holders is difficult, because the departments want to protect the residents’ privacy. Betts, however, helps the city track where the former residents of public housing have moved. Over time, she and Janikowski realized that they were doing their fieldwork in the same neighborhoods.

About six months ago, they decided to put a hunch to the test. Janikowski merged his computer map of crime patterns with Betts’s map of Section8 rentals. Where Janikowski saw a bunny rabbit, Betts saw a sideways horseshoe (“He has a better imagination,” she said). Otherwise, the match was near-perfect. On the merged map, dense violent-crime areas are shaded dark blue, and Section8 addresses are represented by little red dots. All of the dark-blue areas are covered in little red dots, like bursts of gunfire. The rest of the city has almost no dots.

Betts remembers her discomfort as she looked at the map. The couple had been musing about the connection for months, but they were amazed—and deflated—to see how perfectly the two data sets fit together. She knew right away that this would be a “hard thing to say or write.” Nobody in the antipoverty community and nobody in city leadership was going to welcome the news that the noble experiment that they’d been engaged in for the past decade had been bringing the city down, in ways they’d never expected. But the connection was too obvious to ignore, and Betts and Janikowski figured that the same thing must be happening all around the country. Eventually, they thought, they’d find other researchers who connected the dots the way they had, and then maybe they could get city leaders, and even national leaders, to listen.” Atlantic Monthly

Sunday, June 22, 2008

Democrat Leaders Admit Their Guilt

We now have incontrovertible proof that the Democratic Party is a party whose leaders are liars and scoundrels. This week the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives passed an Iraq War Funding bill that, for the first time in years, contained no restrictions or pull-out dates. That same House also passed a FISA bill covering the electronic surveillance of suspected foreign terrorists communicating with domestic accomplices. This bill has been stuck in Congress for many months - endangering our efforts to protect ourselves from terrorist plots. The reason for the holdup was, ostensibly, due to the reluctance of Democrat leaders (including his Eminence, Senator Obama) to approve the granting of immunity from lawsuits to American telecom companies that cooperated with requests by the U.S. government in the scary days after 9/11 when we all believed other attacks were imminent. Why the change? Why now?

The answer is crystal-clear. These bills were not held up because Democrat leaders oppose the Iraq War. They know full well that President Bush had no choice but to act preemptively in this age of nuclear bombs and ballistic missiles. They knew full well that the patriotic acts of the telecom companies should be rewarded, not be sued. And they knew full well that if Obama becomes president, he will face the same problems as did Bush. They passed these bills because they believe that Obama has a good chance to win November’s election, and they do not wish to hamstring him as they have hamstrung and vilified President Bush for the last five years. As President, Senator Obama would need considerable flexibility in Iraq, and he will probably need the cooperation of the telecom companies just as did Bush. In other words, these Democrat leaders have played politics with our national security, and they should be thrown out of office in disgrace.

In the following article, Lisa Fabrisio points out other areas of left-wing malfeasance:

”There are approximately 150 days left until the November elections and they can't come too soon. In case you haven't noticed, especially if you read the papers, the Democrats have controlled Congress for a year and a half and things haven't exactly been going according to plan.

Global warmists suffered a chill this week when the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act went down to defeat. The blatant cap and trade bill would have bankrupted our economy in the service of an alarmist threat built upon the shifting sands of junk science….

And hopefully it's only a matter of time before that opinion makes its way across the Atlantic; challenging the spurious claims of the Anthropogenic Global Climate Change crowd, as they now call themselves.

Time is running out for them as evidenced by the fact that over 30,000 American scientists, including 9,000 with Ph.D.s, have signed a petition denying that humans have any effect on what we used to call the weather. The petition says, in part:There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gasses is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the earth's atmosphere and disruption of the earth's climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the earth.

And, not surprisingly, proof of this continues to emerge. Over the past two decades, NASA satellites have collected data which shows that the planet is in a cycle of greening itself and that "the Earth as a whole became more bountiful by a whopping 6.2%." The reason? "Their 2004 study, and other more recent ones, point to the warming of the planet and the presence of CO2, a gas indispensable to plant life."

Soon, the drumbeat of truth will be too loud to ignore, even for the mainstream media, and attempts by the AGCC gang to blame the current cooling trends on La Nina will be gone with the wind. But don't wait for the announcement that it's all been a farce, as the left rarely admits its mistakes.

ONE GLARING EXCEPTION is the acknowledgment by the World Health Organization that the threat of a global heterosexual pandemic of AIDS has "disappeared," and that "outside sub-Saharan Africa, it was confined to high-risk groups including men who have sex with men, injecting drug users, and sex workers and their clients."

In the 20 or so years that the opposite myth was allowed to circulate, gays and their supporters garnered much sympathy and made great progress toward seeing their lifestyle gain popular acceptance. After all, it could happen to anyone, right? Wrong.

But now the clock is running on the gay marriage agenda, as evidenced by the California Supreme Court's refusal to stay its decision on gay marriage until the voice of the people is heard. They know that a pro-traditional marriage Constitutional Amendment just might pass this November as did a similar measure in 2000. And so they are in a hurry to allow "marriages" between now and then to muddy up the legal waters so our betters in the courts can continue to decide things for us.

Another election issue that is a ticking time bomb is runaway gas prices. The longer Democrats continue to block drilling in ANWR and offshore, the greater the opportunity for the GOP to point out where much of the fault lies.

Although our education system and the media have done a great job in advancing the liberal agenda, most Americans can still grasp that Democratic plans to tax oil company profits will result in those companies passing those increases on to consumers. They are coming to understand that local, state and federal governments make nearly twice the amount on a gallon of gas that the oil companies do. This issue should be a no-brainer for Republicans.

ON ANOTHER FRONT, liberals are in a desperate rush to end the Iraq War before it can be won. While Democratic fringe groups have for years been against any military action not engaged in by Bill Clinton, their leadership has been in a race against the clock to show their "support" for our troops by declaring their mission a failure and bringing them home as defeated and dispirited losers.

But here again, time is clearly not on their side. Sunnis and Shias are fast coming together in support of the Iraqi Army who recently retook Basra, Sadr City and Mosul, bases formerly under insurgent control. U.S. combat deaths last month totaled 20, the lowest number in four years. A year ago, the total for May was 121. Al Qaeda in Iraq is on the run, as should be those who gave them aid and comfort by opposing our efforts there at every turn.

If Republicans can't capitalize on the sense of urgency in American pocketbooks and persuade John McCain to renounce his positions on ANWR and global warming; if they won't stand up for traditional marriage while popular sentiment is still with them; and if they can't make the most of our country's love for its military and their mission; then they deserve to lose in November.”

Friday, June 20, 2008

The Man-made Global Warming Frenzy and 4$ Gas

I am hopeful that, by this time next year, only the most committed left-wingers dedicated to destroying capitalism and imposing socialism will still be wringing their hands over man-made global warming. The fraud and the junk-science behind it have now been completely exposed.

You may want to give credit where credit is due to Al Gore and his global warming campaign the next time you fill your car with gasoline, because there is a direct connection between Global Warming and four dollar a gallon gas. It is shocking, but true, to learn that the entire Global Warming frenzy is based on the environmentalist’s attack on fossil fuels, particularly gasoline. All this big time science, international meetings, thick research papers, dire threats for the future; all of it, comes down to their claim that the carbon dioxide in the exhaust from your car and in the smoke stacks from our power plants is destroying the climate of planet Earth. What an amazing fraud; what a scam.

The future of our civilization lies in the balance.

That’s the battle cry of the High Priest of Global Warming Al Gore and his fellow, agenda driven disciples as they predicta calamitous outcome from anthropogenic global warming. According to Mr. Gore the polar ice caps will collapse and melt and sea levels will rise 20 feet inundating the coastal cities making 100 million of us refugees. Vice President Gore tells us numerous Pacific islands will be totally submerged and uninhabitable. He tells us global warming will disrupt the circulation of the ocean waters, dramatically changing climates, throwing the world food supply into chaos. He tells us global warming will turn hurricanes into super storms, produce droughts, wipe out the polar bears and result in bleaching of coral reefs. He tells us tropical diseases will spread to mid latitudes and heat waves will kill tens of thousands. He preaches to us that we must change our lives and eliminate fossil fuels or face the dire consequences. The future of our civilization is in the balance.

With a preacher’s zeal, Mr. Gore sets out to strike terror into us and our children and make us feel we are all complicit in the potential demise of the planet.Here is my rebuttal.

There is no significant man made global warming. There has not been any in the past, there is none now and there is no reason to fear any in the future. The climate of Earth is changing. It has always changed. But mankind’s activities have not overwhelmed or significantly modified the natural forces.

Through all history, Earth has shifted between two basic climate regimes: ice ages and what paleoclimatologists call “Interglacial periods”. For the past 10 thousand years the Earth has been in an interglacial period. That might well be called nature’s global warming because what happens during an interglacial period is the Earth warms up, the glaciers melt and life flourishes. Clearly from our point of view, an interglacial period is greatly preferred to the deadly rigors of an ice age. Mr. Gore and his crowd would have us believe that the activities of man have overwhelmed nature during this interglacial period and are producing an unprecedented, out of control warming.

Well, it is simply not happening. Worldwide there was a significant natural warming trend in the 1980’s and 1990’s as a Solar cycle peaked with lots of sunspots and solar flares. That ended in 1998 and now the Sun has gone quiet with fewer and fewer Sun spots, and the global temperatures have gone into decline. Earth has cooled for almost ten straight years. So, I ask Al Gore, where’s the global warming?

The cooling trend is so strong that recently the head of the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had to acknowledge it. He speculated that nature has temporarily overwhelmed mankind’s warming and it may be ten years or so before the warming returns. Oh, really. We are supposed to be in a panic about man-made global warming and the whole thing takes a ten year break because of the lack of Sun spots. If this weren’t so serious, it would be laughable.

Now allow me to talk a little about the science behind the global warming frenzy. I have dug through thousands of pages of research papers, including the voluminous documents published by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. I have worked my way through complicated math and complex theories. Here’s the bottom line: the entire global warming scientific case is based on the increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from the use of fossil fuels. They don’t have any other issue. Carbon Dioxide, that’s it.

Hello Al Gore; Hello UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Your science is flawed; your hypothesis is wrong; your data is manipulated. And, may I add, your scare tactics are deplorable. The Earth does not have a fever. Carbon dioxide does not cause significant global warming.

The focus on atmospheric carbon dioxide grew out a study by Roger Revelle who was an esteemed scientist at the Scripps Oceanographic Institute. He took his research with him when he moved to Harvard and allowed his students to help him process the data for his paper. One of those students was Al Gore. That is where Gore got caught up in this global warming frenzy. Revelle’s paper linked the increases in carbon dioxide, CO2, in the atmosphere with warming. It labeled CO2 as a greenhouse gas.

Charles Keeling, another researcher at the Scripps Oceanographic Institute, set up a system to make continuous CO2 measurements. His graph of these increases has now become known as the Keeling Curve. When Charles Keeling died in 2005, his son David, also at Scripps, took over the measurements. Here is what the Keeling curve shows: an increase in CO2 from 315 parts per million in 1958 to 385 parts per million today, an increase of 70 parts per million or about 20 percent.

All the computer models, all of the other findings, all of the other angles of study, all come back to and are based on CO2 as a significant greenhouse gas. It is not.

Here is the deal about CO2, carbon dioxide. It is a natural component of our atmosphere. It has been there since time began. It is absorbed and emitted by the oceans. It is used by every living plant to trigger photosynthesis. Nothing would be green without it. And we humans; we create it. Every time we breathe out, we emit carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. It is not a pollutant. It is not smog. It is a naturally occurring invisible gas.

Let me illustrate. I estimate that this square in front of my face contains 100,000 molecules of atmosphere. Of those 100,000 only 38 are CO2; 38 out of a hundred thousand. That makes it a trace component. Let me ask a key question: how can this tiny trace upset the entire balance of the climate of Earth? It can’t. That’s all there is to it; it can’t.

The UN IPCC has attracted billions of dollars for the research to try to make the case that CO2 is the culprit of run-away, man-made global warming. The scientists have come up with very complex creative theories and done elaborate calculations and run computer models they say prove those theories. They present us with a concept they call radiative forcing. The research organizations and scientists who are making a career out of this theory, keep cranking out the research papers. Then the IPCC puts on big conferences at exotic places, such as the recent conference in Bali. The scientists endorse each other’s papers, they are summarized and voted on, and viola, we are told global warming is going to kill us all unless we stop burning fossil fuels.

May I stop here for a few historical notes? First, the internal combustion engine and gasoline were awful polluters when they were first invented. And, both gasoline and automobile engines continued to leave a layer of smog behind right up through the 1960’s. Then science and engineering came to the environmental rescue. Better exhaust and ignition systems, catalytic converters, fuel injectors, better engineering throughout the engine and reformulated gasoline have all contributed to a huge reduction in the exhaust emissions from today’s cars. Their goal then was to only exhaust carbon dioxide and water vapor, two gases widely accepted as natural and totally harmless. Anyone old enough to remember the pall of smog that used to hang over all our cities knows how much improvement there has been. So the environmentalists, in their battle against fossil fuels and automobiles had a very good point forty years ago, but now they have to focus almost entirely on the once harmless carbon dioxide. And, that is the rub. Carbon dioxide is not an environmental problem; they just want you now to think it is.

Numerous independent research projects have been done about the greenhouse impact from increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide. These studies have proven to my total satisfaction that CO2 is not creating a major greenhouse effect and is not causing an increase in temperatures. By the way, before his death, Roger Revelle coauthored a paper cautioning that CO2 and its greenhouse effect did not warrant extreme countermeasures.

So now it has come down to an intense campaign, orchestrated by environmentalists claiming that the burning of fossil fuels dooms the planet to run-away global warming. Ladies and Gentlemen, that is a myth.

So how has the entire global warming frenzy with all its predictions of dire consequences, become so widely believed, accepted and regarded as a real threat to planet Earth? That is the most amazing part of the story.

To start with global warming has the backing of the United Nations, a major world force. Second, it has the backing of a former Vice President and very popular political figure. Third it has the endorsement of Hollywood, and that’s enough for millions. And, fourth, the environmentalists love global warming. It is their tool to combat fossil fuels. So with the environmentalists, the UN, Gore and Hollywood touting Global Warming and predictions of doom and gloom, the media has scrambled with excitement to climb aboard. After all the media loves a crisis. From YK2 to killer bees the media just loves to tell us our lives are threatened. And the media is biased toward liberal, so it’s pre-programmed to support Al Gore and UN. CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times, The LA Times, The Washington Post, the Associated Press and here in San Diego The Union Tribune are all constantly promoting the global warming crisis.

So who is going to go against all of that power? Not the politicians. So now the President of the United States, just about every Governor, most Senators and most Congress people, both of the major current candidates for President, most other elected officials on all levels of government are all riding the Al Gore Global Warming express. That is one crowded bus.

I suspect you haven’t heard it because the mass media did not report it, but I am not alone on the no man-made warming side of this issue. On May 20th, a list of the names of over thirty-one thousand scientists who refute global warming was released. Thirty-one thousand of which 9,000 are Ph.ds. Think about that. Thirty-one thousand. That dwarfs the supposed 2,500 scientists on the UN panel. In the past year, five hundred of scientists have issued public statements challenging global warming. A few more join the chorus every week. There are about 100 defectors from the UN IPCC.

There was an International Conference of Climate Change Skeptics in New York in March of this year. One hundred of us gave presentations. Attendance was limited to six hundred people. Every seat was taken. There are a half dozen excellent internet sites that debunk global warming. And, thank goodness for KUSI and Michael McKinnon, its owner. He allows me to post my comments on global warming on the website KUSI.com. Following the publicity of my position form Fox News, Glen Beck on CNN, Rush Limbaugh and a host of other interviews, thousands of people come to the website and read my comments. I get hundreds of supportive emails from them. No I am not alone and the debate is not over.

In my remarks in New York I speculated that perhaps we should sue Al Gore for fraud because of his carbon credits trading scheme. That remark has caused a stir in the fringe media and on the internet. The concept is that if the media won’t give us a hearing and the other side will not debate us, perhaps we could use a Court of law to present our papers and our research and if the Judge is unbiased and understands science, we win. The media couldn’t ignore that. That idea has become the basis for legal research by notable attorneys and discussion among global warming debunkers, but it’s a long way from the Court room.

I am very serious about this issue. I think stamping out the global warming scam is vital to saving our wonderful way of life.

The battle against fossil fuels has controlled policy in this country for decades. It was the environmentalist’s prime force in blocking any drilling for oil in this country and the blocking the building of any new refineries, as well. So now the shortage they created has sent gasoline prices soaring. And, it has lead to the folly of ethanol, which is also partly behind the fuel price increases; that and our restricted oil policy. The ethanol folly is also creating a food crisis throughput the world – it is behind the food price rises for all the grains, for cereals, bread, everything that relies on corn or soy or wheat, including animals that are fed corn, most processed foods that use corn oil or soybean oil or corn syrup. Food shortages or high costs have led to food riots in some third world countries and made the cost of eating out or at home budget busting for many.

So now the global warming myth actually has lead to the chaos we are now enduring with energy and food prices. We pay for it every time we fill our gas tanks. Not only is it running up gasoline prices, it has changed government policy impacting our taxes, our utility bills and the entire focus of government funding. And, now the Congress is considering a cap and trade carbon credits policy. We the citizens will pay for that, too. It all ends up in our taxes and the price of goods and services.

So the Global warming frenzy is, indeed, threatening our civilization. Not because global warming is real; it is not. But because of the all the horrible side effects of the global warming scam.

I love this civilization. I want to do my part to protect it. If Al Gore and his global warming scare dictates the future policy of our governments, the current economic downturn could indeed become a recession, drift into a depression and our modern civilization could fall into an abyss. And it would largely be a direct result of the global warming frenzy.

My mission, in what is left of a long and exciting lifetime, is to stamp out this Global Warming silliness and let all of us get on with enjoying our lives and loving our planet, Earth.

Thursday, June 19, 2008

This Careful Generation By Roger W. Gardner

This, my friends, in case you haven’t noticed, is a very careful generation. In fact, I’ve lived in this wonderful country of ours for a little over seven decades now, and this is without a doubt the most “careful” generation that I have ever had the misfortune to live amongst. Somehow we’ve managed to become the most careful people in the world, maybe the most careful people in history. We live in constant fear that we might inadvertently say something truthful that might offend someone, somewhere. We’ve learned to call this pervasive state of denial Political Correctness. But is it really Political Correctness, I wonder, or is it something else?

I ask myself, is this present pacifistic crop of Chamberlainesque appeasers really being “careful” of other people‘s feelings, or merely being cowardly? Are all of our so-called PCisms truly demonstrations of our consideration for others, or are they rather an expression of our fear of others? Are we avoiding confrontation with those who threaten our lives and our culture out of kindness and tolerance, or are we just desperately trying to avoid that confrontation? Are we perhaps concerned that we might just antagonize our antagonists even more by naming them? Are we hoping to avoid the inevitable nastiness of these confrontations by hiding behind this intricately-wrought screen of euphemisms called Political Correctness?

When you think about it, isn’t this really that same old weasely logic that in the 1950s induced us to call a Jew “someone of the Jewish persuasion”? As though they had somehow been persuaded to become a Jew. Isn’t this just the latest manifestation of that same old hypocritical crap? Did we also talk about “someone of the Christian persuasion” in the 1950s? I don’t think so.

In short, this is nothing all that new, it’s that old familiar circuitous obfuscation that wouldn’t allow us to call a Jew a Jew. Why? Would a Jew be offended to be called a Jew? Hardly. Every Jew I’ve ever known was proud to be a Jew. Could it be perhaps that we found that word so offensive that we could hardly bring ourselves to say it? Were these semantic acrobatics really evidence of our consideration for others or evidence of that intransigent American brand of anti-Semitism? Was this an example of some early form of Political Correctness in action? Or are we really talking about something else here. Something a little bit easier to understand, but something too awful to actually put it into words. Something called the truth.

Well, I’m going to get a lot of people pissed off right now — or at least I‘m going to give it a good try. You see, I’m getting sick and tired of being careful. I don’t know how the hell I ever let them talk me into all this [bull****] in the first place.

This all started when I read that incredible little article this past Christmas, which I’m sure you’ve all heard about by now, about that Santa school Down Under that instructed their student Santas to no longer say “ho-ho-ho”, because it had a double meaning in the American Black Community, and that some people might find it offensive.

What???

My God, what have we become? We stand by meekly and watch as our wonderful English language becomes increasingly denigrated and devalued, we allow the primitive animalistic gruntings of our Black Inner City Gangsta Rap, pants-falling-off-the-butt “culture” to infiltrate and diminish almost every aspect of our lives: our music, our movies, our television, our sports, the way our kids act and dress — and now we’re going to tell our Santa Clauses not to say “ho-ho-ho” because it too closely resembles that Gangsta Rap word for “whore”?

Wait a minute. Isn’t there something wrong with this picture?

Who are the folks here who should be offended?

After that, I read another article that purported to be an investigation into the causes of the enormous increase in the murder rate in one of our largest East Coast cities — actually, two articles written explicitly to address this single major problem. However, throughout the entire two articles, not one mention was made of what had actually happened to this city. Not one single reference to the fact that this wildly escalating crime rate just happened to correspond to the most catastrophic societal upheaval in that city’s four-hundred year history. Not only did the articles not even mention these irrefutable truths, but somehow the author ingeniously avoided mentioning that any racial changes had taken place there at all. If someone didn’t know the actual facts of the city in question they would be left to surmise that the city had just suddenly started becoming more criminal for no apparent reason. This, my friends, is what currently passes for Political Correctness. But is it?

Here’s what happened: the Inner City turned Black and the crime rate soared.

Sorry, but that’s what happened.

And I really am sorry; because it was my city of origin that was the subject of these counterfeit articles. I was born and brought up there.

And this Black murder rate in this Black Inner City is a Black problem, not a White problem. These Inner City Black Gangstas are not selling crack because their great-great-grandmothers were slaves. And that disingenuous author who so adroitly skirted the most obvious by never once mentioning race, by referring to “these people and their drug problems” would have had that same delicate problem back in the 1950s calling a Jew a Jew.

The murder of young Black males by other young Black males in the Black Inner Cities is a Black problem and can only be solved by Blacks. Blacks who are willing to be honest with themselves. Blacks who are getting sick and tired of that criminal-worshipping, female-degrading, drive-by shooting, Gangsta Rap drug world of self-destruction. Blacks who are willing to listen to those honest and tough love messages of respected Black people like Bill Cosby, and even from those unapologetic liberals, like Juan Williams. Blacks who are willing to accept responsibility for their own lives and want to quit blaming everything on the Whites, who finally have the courage to disassociate themselves from those so-called Black Leaders, like Al Sharpton and that extortionist Jesse Jackson, who are nothing more than enablers, living off the suffering of others. Offering their followers that same old false comfort of self-pity and victimization by perpetuating the myth of White subjugation.

By pretending that this is still a White problem, that only White people are smart enough to fix it, those delusional liberals are only making matters worse. It’s trying to cure the alcoholic’s problem by telling him he has good reason to drink. And it just ain’t gonna work.

So, what are we really talking about here? Blacks? Jews? Racism? Anti-Semitism? No, we’re still talking about Political Correctness — or perhaps, more precisely, that same old cowardly dis-ingenuousness in it’s latest disguise? A problem we’ve been wrestling with throughout that whole tumultuous course of human history. It’s called moral integrity. Some people simply call it honesty.

Now, before all you liberals out there rush to get your ammunition and start bombarding me with those familiar epithets of Racist and Bigot, just answer this one simple question. If we are afraid to even identify a problem, how the hell can we expect to fix it? If no one can even address these issues for fear of being labeled a racist or bigot, then tell me how we are going to discuss the issues? With obsequious code words like “these people and their drug problems“? For God’s sake, what people are we talking about? The Swedes? The Chinese?

If the Chinese people were the major contributing factor to the rise of the crime rates in most of our major cities, then we should most certainly be able to acknowledge this fact and try to do something about it. But it isn’t the Chinese people who are causing these terrible Inner City problems, is it? And it isn’t always the Blacks. Sometimes it’s the Mexicans, and sometimes it’s somebody else. But, if we ever hope to do anything about these enormous and growing problems, we had better learn how to talk about them honestly. And have the courage to say who it is we are really talking about.

We have, it seems, traded our language of truth for some weak-kneed second-rate vocabulary of denial; and, most unfortunate of all, some of us are actually pleased with this ignoble transaction. They call it progressive; I call it regressive. They call it Political Correctness; I call it cowardice.

During this past Christmas season, when a television commercial were enticing us into thinking about buying a brand new Lincoln for our lover, while adroitly managing to circumvent that contentious word “Christmas”, substituting it with that inept and meaningless word “Holiday”, were these car manufacturers sincerely interested in promoting cultural inclusiveness, or just afraid of the ACLU? Was this just one more example of this new-fangled ideology called Political Correctness? Or was it just that same old-fashioned cowardice hiding its ugly head?

We are losing our national nerve. We live in constant fear. We are afraid of being sued, afraid of being attacked, afraid of being disliked, and we are afraid of being called names. Fear has infiltrated every area of our lives and corrupted our ability to be effective as a people, as a nation. We are even afraid to admit that we are afraid. We are even becoming afraid to be patriotic Americans.

The school board who lifts the Lord’s Prayer or the Pledge of Allegiance from that unfortunate school’s curriculum isn’t doing this out of some high-minded noble concept of inclusiveness — they’re afraid of being sued by some loathsome Dr. Newdow (described by one enthusiastic atheist as “…one of the greatest heroes in the war against religious demagogues”).

To attempt to hide this blatant cowardice behind some shining shield of Political Correctness is a lie which we can no longer ignore, and which we can no longer afford to tolerate.

When we choose to refer to our brave Israeli ally’s ongoing attempts to protect their tiny nation from that continuous generational onslaught from their vicious and hate-filled neighbors and their brutal suicide-bombers as an “Arab/Israeli conflict”, rather than calling it what it is — “The Arab War Against Israel” — are we not demonstrating to the world our unconscionable lack of moral fiber? Did we refer to that WWII horror show in the Pacific as some morally-neuter “Japanese/American Conflict”? Hell no.

If I get stopped by a cop for driving without a license, will he let me go if I explain that what I’m doing isn’t really illegal, that I’m really just an undocumented driver? We have become so accustomed to navigating through the perils of this world using these subtle subterfuges and lies we no longer even notice them.

On September 11, 2001 we were attacked by nineteen Muslim terrorists. They left final testaments clearly explaining their motivations for committing this horrendous crime against humanity. They wanted to kill the Infidels. And they killed 2,987 innocent people that day — and we have still not managed to conjure up the political will to profile Muslim men at our airports.

Does anyone still believe that this is truly an expression of Political Correctness, our good-hearted and sincere efforts to avoid offending anyone of a different faith or race? Or is this just one more instance of a government and an industry caving in to fear. The fear of being sued by CAIR or their faithful ally, the ACLU.

While Islamic leaders worldwide exhort their eager followers to kill the Infidel, and describe this monumental struggle with unabashed clarity as a War of Islam against the West, of Muslims against Infidels, our own president very carefully describes this same militant religion as a “religion of Peace”. We console ourselves with the comforting illusion that what we are really up against in this so-called War on Terror is just a small fanatical minority who have hijacked a “peaceful religion”. We ignore all information to the contrary, no matter what its source, no matter how valid. Islam has declared War on the West but, none the less, we must be very careful not to offend any Muslims. They might think we’re racists. CAIR might sue us. Jimmy Carter might get upset.

Somehow, my friends, before it really is too late, we have to come out from behind our warm and fuzzy euphemisms and have the courage to confront this world that‘s really there, not the one we wished was there. We can no longer blame our dishonorable inaction on Political Correctness. For, when all is said and done, our so-called PC culture is nothing but another form of cowardice. And this cowardice is not only never going to allow us to solve any of our problems, it’s going to get us killed.

Wednesday, June 18, 2008

'Bush Lied; People Died' Oh, Wait a Minute

Liberal Democrats really do live in some bizarro, parallel universe where an Arctic wasteland must be protected from oil exploration, and the truth can be overwhelmed by repeated cries of “Bush lied; People died”. A Nazi named Goebbels once learned the hard way that the big lie would remain a lie no matter how many times it was repeated. The following report is from the Washington Post, not exactly a Republican mouthpiece.

WASHINGTON – Search the Internet for "Bush Lied" products, and you will find sites that offer more than a thousand designs. The basic "Bush Lied, People Died" bumper sticker is only the beginning.

Sen. John Rockefeller, D-W. Va., chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence, set out to provide the official foundation for what has become not only a thriving business but, more important, an article of faith among millions of Americans. And in releasing a committee report Thursday, he claimed to have accomplished his mission, though he did not use the L-word. "In making the case for war, the administration repeatedly presented intelligence as fact when it was unsubstantiated, contradicted or even nonexistent," he said.

There's no question that the administration, and particularly Vice President Dick Cheney, spoke with too much certainty at times and failed to anticipate or prepare the American people for the enormous undertaking in Iraq.

But dive into Mr. Rockefeller's report, in search of where exactly President Bush lied about what his intelligence agencies were telling him about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein, and you may be surprised by what you find.

On weapons of mass destruction overall (a separate section of the intelligence committee report)? "Generally substantiated by intelligence information." Delivery vehicles such as ballistic missiles? "Generally substantiated by available intelligence." Unmanned aerial vehicles that could be used to deliver WMDs? "Generally substantiated by intelligence information."

As you read through the report, you begin to think maybe you've mistakenly picked up the minority dissent. But, no, this is the Rockefeller indictment. So, you think, the smoking gun must appear in the section on Mr. Bush's claims about Saddam Hussein's alleged ties to terrorism.

But statements regarding Iraq's support for terrorist groups other than al-Qaeda "were substantiated by intelligence information." Statements that Iraq provided safe haven for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and other terrorists with ties to al-Qaeda "were substantiated by the intelligence assessments," and statements regarding Iraq's contacts with al-Qaeda "were substantiated by intelligence information."

The report is left to complain about "implications" and statements that "left the impression" that those contacts led to substantive Iraqi cooperation.

In the report's final section, the committee takes issue with Mr. Bush's statements about Mr. Hussein's intentions and what the future might have held. But was that really a question of misrepresenting intelligence, or was it a question of judgment that politicians are expected to make?

After all, it was not Mr. Bush, but Mr. Rockefeller, who said in October 2002: "There has been some debate over how 'imminent' a threat Iraq poses. I do believe Iraq poses an imminent threat. I also believe after September 11, that question is increasingly outdated. ... To insist on further evidence could put some of our fellow Americans at risk. Can we afford to take that chance? I do not think we can."

Why does it matter, at this late date? The Rockefeller report will not cause a spike in "Bush Lied" mug sales. But the phony "Bush lied" story line distracts from the biggest prewar failure: the fact that so much of the intelligence upon which Mr. Bush and Mr. Rockefeller and everyone else relied turned out to be tragically, catastrophically wrong.

And it trivializes a double dilemma that President Bill Clinton faced before Mr. Bush and that President Obama or McCain may well face after: when to act on a threat in the inevitable absence of perfect intelligence and how to mobilize popular support for such action, if deemed essential for national security, in a democracy that will always, and rightly, be reluctant.

For the next president, it may be Iran's nuclear program, or al-Qaeda sanctuaries in Pakistan, or, more likely, some potential horror that today no one even imagines. When that time comes, there will be plenty of warnings to heed from the Iraq experience, without the need to fictionalize more.

Monday, June 16, 2008

What Americans Need to Know about Islam

I had a delightful luncheon with two of my grandsons on Fathers Day, and one of the topics under discussion was what the older one had observed about the clashes between Muslims and the native populations in several European countries he had visited, including Holland and France. President Bush, as president of all Americans, has often reminded us that Muslim-Americans should not be subjected to harassment as an expression of our anger about barbaric Islamic terrorist acts carried out against Americans – including 9/11.

President Bush, not wanting the War on Terror to become a religious war, has also stated several times that most of the world’s Muslims are peaceful people who want the same things for their children as do we. Nevertheless, Muslim history cannot be ignored or denied (as American liberals seem to do), and it is clear that 1. Islam is a political movement as much as it is a religion – and must be dealt with as such, and 2. We must be vigilant in not allowing the Muslim population to grow, nor allow mosques and schools spreading hate to exist in America.

“The [1] Islamic Saudi Academy in Fairfax County, Virginia, is funded by the Saudi government and operates as an arm of the Saudi Embassy. It has been in the [2] news this week following a [3] report issued by the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), which found that textbooks used by the academy are filled with incitements to violence and racial and religious bigotry.

Missing in most of the national establishment media coverage of the story, however, is the raid on the school last month by state authorities after academy officials failed to report a five-year-old student’s claims of sex abuse by a parent and later attempted to eliminate any traces of the report.

According to a local [4] news report [[5] video] on June 3, the female student reported her claims to her teachers, and a report on the matter was drawn up by the teachers and the school’s principal and submitted to administrators. But when the allegations reached the desk of school director Abdullah Al-Shabnan, he didn’t believe the girl and failed to report the sex abuse claims to law enforcement within the 72 hours required by state law.

Apparently tipped off on a cover-up, law enforcement authorities raided the school on May 23 to seize computers and look for evidence after Al-Shabnan ordered the original report deleted from school computers.

Just three days before the raid, the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors [6] voted unanimously to renew the academy’s lease of county property, ignoring multiple reports of the school’s promotion of violence and hatred.

This is far from the first time that the Islamic Saudi Academy has received unwelcome public scrutiny. Just a few days ago, the academy’s 1999 class valedictorian, Ahmed Omar Abu Ali, had his 2005 conviction [7] upheld by the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals on charges that he joined Al-Qaeda and had plotted to assassinate President George W. Bush. Abu Ali was sentenced to 30 years in prison.

As [8] noted by Evan Kohlmann at Counterterrorism Blog, Abu Ali had joined an Al-Qaeda cell in Saudi Arabia while studying at the University of Medina, and one of his Al-Qaeda co-conspirators was killed in a shoot-out with Saudi authorities.

Last October the USCIRF sent a letter to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice [9] asking her to close the school if academy officials continued to [10] refuse to turn over copies of their textbooks to ensure that passages advocating violence against Jews, Christians, and other non-Muslims were scrubbed. At the time, USCIRF Commissioner Nina Shea [11] observed that since 9/11 the school had alternately denied that such passages existed, claimed it had already removed such (non-existent) passages, and stated that it was working on removing such (non-existent) passages.”

And thanks to Gabe for providing us with this overview of Islam in the world:

“Islam is not a religion, nor is it a cult. In it's fullest form, it is a complete, total, 100% system of life.

Islam has religious, legal, political, economic, social, and military components. The religious component is a beard for all of the other components.

Islamization begins when there are sufficient Muslims in a country to agitate for their religious rights.

When politically correct, tolerant, and culturally diverse societies agree to Muslim demands for their religious rights, some of the other components tend to creep in as well. Here's how it works.

As long as the Muslim population remains around or under 2% in any given country, they will be for the most part be regarded as a peace-loving minority, and not as a threat to other citizens. This is the case in:

From 5% on, they exercise an inordinate influence in proportion to their percentage of the population. For example, they will push for the introduction of halal (clean by Islamic standards) food, thereby securing food preparation jobs for Muslims. They will increase pressure on supermarket chains to feature halal on their shelves -- along with threats for failure to comply. This is occurring in:

At this point, they will work to get the ruling government to allow them to rule themselves (within their ghettos) under Sharia, the Islamic Law. The ultimate goal of Islamists is to establish Sharia law over the entire world.

When Muslims approach 10% of the population, they tend to increase lawlessness as a means of complaint about their conditions. In Paris, we are already seeing car-burnings. Any non-Muslim action offends Islam, and results in uprisings and threats, such as in Amsterdam, with opposition to Mohammed cartoons and films about Islam. Such tensions are seen daily, particularly in Muslim sections, in:

From 60%, nations experience unfettered persecution of non-believers of all other religions (including non-conforming Muslims), sporadic ethnic cleansing (genocide), use of Sharia Law as a weapon, and Jizya, the tax placed on infidels, such as in:

After 80%, expect daily intimidation and violent jihad, some State-run ethnic cleansing, and even some genocide, as these nations drive out the infidels, and move toward 100% Muslim, such as has been experienced and in some ways is on-going in:

100% will usher in the peace of 'Dar-es-Salaam' -- the Islamic House of Peace. Here there's supposed to be peace, because everybody is a Muslim, the Madrasses are the only schools, and the Koran is the only word, such as in:

Unfortunately, peace in never achieved, as in these 100% states the most radical Muslims intimidate and spew hatred, and satisfy their blood lust by killing less radical Muslims, for a variety of reasons.

'Before I was nine I had learned the basic canon of Arab life. It was me against my brother; me and my brother against our father; my family against my cousins and the clan; the clan against the tribe; the tribe against the world, and all of us against the infidel. -- Leon Uris, 'The Haj'

It is important to understand that in some countries, with well under 100% Muslim populations, such as France, the minority Muslim populations live in ghettos, within which they are 100% Muslim, and within which they live by Sharia Law. The national police do not even enter these ghettos. There are no national courts nor schools nor non-Muslim religious facilities. In such situations, Muslims do not integrate into the community at large. The children attend madrasses. They learn only the Koran. To even associate with an infidel is a crime punishable with death. Therefore, in some areas of certain nations, Muslim Imams and extremists exercise more power than the national average would indicate.

Today's 1.5 billion Muslims make up 22% of the world's population. But their birth rates dwarf the birth rates of Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, and Jews, and all other believers. Muslims will exceed 50% of the world's population by the end of this century.”

Saturday, June 14, 2008

The Guantanamo Decision

Most people with a brain and with some concern for the future of this country are understandably upset that the five liberal justices of the Supreme Court could render such an terrible decision involving the unlawful enemy combatants who were captured on the field of battle and brought to Guantanamo – upset, frustrated and heartsick that this decision will increase the danger to us all and turn our soldiers into murderers in some situations. We are also upset that this decision is another indication that we are losing our country to people who see no difference between their fellow citizens and monsters from foreign lands who are sworn to destroy us.

Even Senator McCain, who has not been happy with many aspects of the Guantanamo situation, has severely criticized this decision:

"John McCain on Friday described the decision by the Supreme Court to allow Guantánamo Bay prisoners to challenge their detention in US courts as “one of the worst decisions in the history of this country”.

The Republican presidential candidate said he agreed with the four dissenting justices on the nine-member court that foreign fighters held at the detention camp were not entitled to the rights of US citizens.

He criticised Barack Obama, his Democratic opponent, for supporting the decision and said it highlighted the importance of nominating conservative judges to the Supreme Court. His remarks represented a hardening of his position from his more moderate initial response to the ruling on Thursday, signalling a strategic decision by the McCain campaign to make it an election issue.

Mr McCain’s stance appeared designed to demonstrate his toughness on national security, while casting Mr Obama as soft on terrorists. It also looked calculated to spark debate on the future of the Supreme Court – one of the most important election issues for many conservative voters."

To those of you out there who see this decision as further evidence that the radical left has taken over, and that the battle for individual freedom has been lost, please read the following article (published before Obama clinched the nomination):

2008 marks the end of liberalism as a governing force in the same way that 1968 marked the end of liberalism as a political doctrine.

American liberals spent the '60s seeing their programs and policies collapse one after the other. The War on Crime, the War on Poverty, civil rights legislation, Vietnam, all were either unmitigated disasters or textbook examples of the law of unintended consequences. The Democrats went into the 1968 presidential election as crippled as any political party in American history, choked with failure, bereft of ideas, and facing a general uprising from their own younger elements.

The Democrats' 1968 Chicago convention marked the end of classical liberalism. Media coverage revealed American liberals as incapable of controlling their own constituency, much less directing a country. As delegates cowered within the convention center, Movement rioters ran wild throughout the downtown area, fighting knock-down, drag-out battles with the police. Not a single liberal figure made any serious attempt to confront, control, or even communicate with the rioters. Little more than a decade after declaring itself the "American civic creed", liberalism was on the ropes.

Instead of joining the Whigs and Know-Nothings in historical oblivion, liberalism surrendered to its internal rebels, the Democratic Party's left wing, indistinguishable in beliefs and intent from any hardcore socialist party on the international scene. In 1972, they ran one of their own, George McGovern who in 1948 had served as delegate for communist front-man Henry Wallace) for the presidency.

McGovern's defeat at the hands of Richard M. Nixon represented no real setback for the new ideology. American leftists commenced their "Long march through the institutions" using techniques developed by Marxist theoretician Antonio Gramsci to take over the media, academia, and much of the bureaucracy. Political liberalism, due in large part to its control over massive urban machines, many of then going back to the days of Tammany, continued as a kind of husk animated by the new leftist persona. But liberalism in the classic sense existed only in the minds of the naive, the ill-informed, and terminally nostalgic.

Followers of the mutant ideology were in no way open with their agenda. Instead they operated under the cover of two pretenses -- superior governance and high morality. Liberals presented themselves as technocrats with a clearer understanding of policy and governance than the opposition. Pragmatism was their creed, results their only criteria. Utilizing the old gimmicks of constituent services and favors and the new ones of planning and centralization, liberalism was able to maintain its dominance in backward and desperate areas of the country such as the Northeast and Upper Midwest.

The claim to higher morality was more inchoate, a kind of luminous abstraction beyond the grasp of money-grubbing Republicans, clearly understandable only by liberals themselves. Liberals claimed a monopoly on compassion, decency, and social justice (as defined by themselves), posing as the sole defenders of civic virtue against a horde of backwoodsmen, racists, and religious fanatics.

This elaborate double imposture served to keep liberalism alive for over three decades in the absence of ideas, doctrine, and serious accomplishments. But 2008 has brought the charade to an end. Events this year have exposed, once and for all, in a way that cannot be denied, elided, or spun, Democratic liberals as the party of abject incompetence and institutionalized corruption.

Eliot Spitzer worked his way to the governorship of New York State as the living embodiment of liberal higher morality, crusading against a series of dubious financial and corporate villains. His downfall as the result of a prostitution scheme too moronic for fiction might be taken as evidence of personal failings and no more were it not for the fact that his replacement, David A. Paterson, confessed to similar activities as the first official act of his administration. (If not even more egregious -- no one, after all, has accused Spitzer of trading jobs for sexual favors).

We need only add James McGreevey, ousted in 2004 from New Jersey's governorship for homosexual escapades with an aide (apppointed to a homeland security job with the state for which he had no qualifications), to conclude that liberalism has subsided to a level of corruption of European dimensions.

It's often overlooked -- thanks in large part to the Clinton "legacy" -- that such misbehavior is almost always accompanied by corruption in other spheres. Insistence by Clinton's defenders that his various lady troubles were "personal matters" succeeded in obscuring the moral connection between Big Bill's follies and the endless bribes, kickbacks, suicides, illegal mass firings, and vanishing files that made the "most ethical administration in history" so entertaining to watch.

So it needs restating as a simple truth that a man who cannot control his sexual impulses is unlikely to succeed in more complex matters. In little over a year, Spitzer threw away the goodwill engendered by his landslide victory through a series of petty conspiracies and dirty tricks, bringing New York state government to a standstill in the process. While McGreevey was a better governor than he's ever likely to get credit for (he solved the longstanding auto-insurance "crisis" that made New Jersey a laughingstock for half a dozen previous administrations), his penchant for putting his muscle boys on the state payroll undercuts any other claims for his record. The same can be said for Paterson. Though, being both blind and black, he may likely survive, revelations concerning his practice of awarding jobs and positions don't bode well for the future.

These men are clearly representative of the post-Clinton Democratic Party. They set out to follow in Bill's footsteps, have ended up much the same as he did, and have dragged their party and political doctrine along with them. (At this point somebody will bring up the names Foley and Craig. But neither stood anywhere near the center of American conservatism in the way that the Northeastern governors do with liberalism as a matter of course. Foley and Craig were rotten apples. With the Democrats, it's the whole barrel.)

In turning to the presidential campaign, we need do no more than mention Madame Hillary. The Ma Barker of Little Rock is in a class by herself when it comes to political iniquity (not to mention dodging snipers). The chief puzzle concerning Hillary is how, being so blatantly what she is, she succeeds in holding onto any support whatsoever. There's a process in quantum mechanics called "renormalization", in which certain quantities with values of infinity are arbitrarily dropped back to a more manageable "zero" for the sake of solving the equation. This encapsulates Hillary's political career: truly mindboggling levels of corruption and ineptitude have been continually renormalized by fellow politicians and the media to enable her to survive. These people made a particular type of bargain when they bent the rules for Hillary. Now the ground is opening up under their feet. It has been a pleasure to watch.

(The question I have about Hillary that's least likely to be answered is this: what did she do to Daniel P. Moynihan? Recall the staged ceremony in which Moynihan handed the mantle of senator over to Hillary. Here was one of the greatest minds of recent American politics, possibly liberalism's last political intellectual, a tower of strength, who for years answered the mad dogs of the UN General Assembly in the only tones they understood, standing beside Hillary, staring at the ground before him, face a mask of shame and self-disgust, and answering in monosyllables. What possible explanation can there be for this?)

Barack Obama was supposed to be another matter. Obama has ascended on a cloud of pure moral superiority and nothing else. That has now evaporated, thanks to impolitic comments from his wife and the news that he has for two decades belonged to what amounts to a racist cult. Obama has nothing else to offer in the way of experience or achievements. Beyond his current difficulties, there lie his continuing and as yet unexplained entanglement with Tony Rezko (He barely knew the man, he insists. All he did was show Rezko his new house before closing. I always clear major purchases with people I scarcely know, don't you?), along with pending revelations concerning his relationship with Bill Ayers, a former terrorist who began his career as one of the driving forces of the Weather Underground.

Obama's response, his "Kennedyesque" speech on race, was in fact purely Clintonian in that it attempted to transform his failings into virtues while placing the blame on the country as a whole. (Not to mention his innocent typical white grandmother.) In less than two weeks, Obama has succeeded in lowering himself to the same level as Madame Hillary. Quite an achievement.

(As for Obama's claims to be a necessary "racial reconciliator", this reconciliation has in fact been going on since the end of segregation, quite successfully too. As is often the case with liberals, Obama is offering a solution to a problem that is solving itself.)

To this gallery we can add Jennifer Granholm, who assured that Michigan's current slide was as drastic and damaging as possible, Ed Rendell, Hillary's consigliere for Pennsylvania, John Murtha, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and Kwame Kilpatrick, charged with perjury, obstruction of justice, and malfeasance in office. That's the Democratic Party, the bastion of American liberalism, as it stands. A party whose entire leadership cadre, including presidential candidates, state governors, and Congressional leaders, are corrupt or incompetent or both, a party more suitable to ruling a Balkan or Central African peapatch than the world's reigning superpower.

2008 is being promoted as the year of the Democrats. Under the circumstances, it's difficult to see this as anything but media hype. Weak as the Republicans may be, they do boast such figures as Schwarzenegger, Jindal, Crist, and Coburn among many others, not to mention a presidential candidate who, whatever his drawbacks, is a different order of being than the opposition.

But there have been danger signs. In the past few years, we've seen a number of "conservative" politicians who have adapted the liberal style, masking their own flaws with acceptable rhetoric. The latest of these is Mike Huckabee, who presented himself as a conservative messiah while governing Arkansas like... well, like a typical governor of Arkansas. Liberalism has demonstrated that these tactics lead nowhere. We must be careful not to succumb.

Liberalism will stagger on. It still has control of all those urban political machines, along with the unions and bureaucracies. But it has no future. Personality cults and ideology will take you only so far. We may yet live to see this albatross removed from the nation's back.

About Me

Russell Wilcox is a retired college professor who spends several months in Florida and several months in Rhode Island each year, and whose interests include boating and sailing, sports, political activism, ballroom dancing and bridge. He has an MBA from Harvard, a Computer Systems CAGS from Bryant and a BS from Northeastern. He has worked in industry for EG&G and Texas Instruments, operated his own business with more than 200 employees, and served as Director of the Computer Information Systems Program for Stonehill College. An Army veteran and private pilot, he is a published author, and is the proud father of four children and the proud grandfather of seven grandchildren and one greatgrandchild. A holder of two patents in microchip connections and a true product of the melting pot, his father is the son of a Yankee farmer, and his mother the first generation daughter of Italian immigrants who retained their culture, but strove mightily to become Americans, sending four sons to fight against Hitler and Mussolini.